Monday, November 24, 2008

The choice cynicism of Jack Spicer

By Ted Burke

Jack Spicer was an odd and inspired contrarian in place during the San Francisco Renaissance, who conceived poetry as "dictation" of a sort. He had gone so far as to refer to the poet as a "radio", a living device able to intercept transmissions from an other wise invisible world of sharper, bolder, more original combinations of sound, rhythm, form. This is a unique way of insisting, again, that the artist is the "antenna of the race", and there is room enough in his thought to wonder if he considered the poet the one in particular who could touch Plato's Ideal Forms, or if thought he had te ability to peak behind the curtain to espy the furniture of Stevens' Supreme Fiction. Spicer was a troubled man, though, an alcoholic, someone at odds with the poetry community he lived in, but he was a serious, sometimes brilliant poet who could calm his erudition and gives us a poetry of propositions, what ifs, things thornier and much less sweet than the soft candy a few dozen celebrity poets win awards for. Here's a a fine poem, a brief lyric essay considering the likeness of some unlike things.

Book Of Musicby Jack Spicer

Coming at an end, the loversAre exhausted like two swimmers. WhereDid it end? There is no telling. No love isLike an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves' boundariesFrom which two can emerge exhausted, nor long goodbyeLike death.Coming at an end. Rather, I would say, like a lengthOf coiled ropeWhich does not disguise in the final twists of its lengthsIts endings.But, you will say, we lovedAnd some parts of us lovedAnd the rest of us will remainTwo persons. Yes,Poetry ends like a rope.

A cynic's view, perhaps, where the picture that's painted first has the gasping awe of young love, perfect, endless like a circle, the world itself, and later, destroyed, cut at the vital moment of greatest vulnerability, merely a thick string that starts at one end and merely ends, absent glory or beauty, at another. Even after the twists and turns of the thing itself--love, the foiled circle--to restore itself in reactionary spasams, things just end, and rapture and passion are replaced by bitter memory, a bitterness that gives way to a mellowed skepticism, if one is lucky to live long enough to be a witness their own foolish expectations of people, places, things, and especially the foolishness one might have said about poetry in whatever earnest declarations one uttered in classrooms, dorm rooms, cafes where the intelligent and underpaid gathered for a cheap drink and company.